Rebeca Méndez on Storm Cloud, John Ruskin, and a Perfect Sky

Artist, designer, and UCLA professor Rebeca Méndez discusses her work Any-Instant-Whatever (2020), which is featured in “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis,” our exhibition for PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Her video installation Any-Instant-Whatever documents 12 hours of Los Angeles’ winter skies, creating an immersive experience that encourages contemplation while also addressing themes of environmental change.

“Storm Cloud” examines the impact of industrialization and a globalized economy on everyday life from 1780 to 1930. The exhibition’s title comes from a series of lectures in 1884 by art critic John Ruskin, who observed how industrialization was polluting the skies.

Learn more about the "Storm Cloud" exhibition here:

Learn more about "PST ART: Art & Science Collide" at:

#TheHuntington #ContemporaryArt #Climate

[lanceneckar]

Lovely and insightful comments on the need for us to be present in complete way in what we are seeing and feeling.
Ruskin was that kind of aesthetic voice too.
I did miss such connection in much of the exhibition, a kind of cabinet of curiosities; for example, between what Ruskin said in Storm Cloud about the red in the sky in Turner's Slave Ship, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (which he owned) and slavery (the map of the Duke Of Chandos's Hope Plantation) and, then, global capitalism/big oil/industrial agriculture/the commodification of nature in bauxite for our phones/water for power and food/art itself, all sprinkled about in the exhibition's artworks/objects that chronicle our devolution of our understanding of our relationship with the rest of nature.

[theamakow]

Gorgeous video! It weaves together a contemporary artwork and a gallery of 19th-century artifacts like a poem, getting at the very essence of the thing.